Representative deployment — an illustrative composite of real deployment patterns.
Situation
A 72 m charter superyacht running Med summers and Caribbean winters, with charter
rates of ~$750,000/week. Guest expectations: simultaneous 4K streaming in every
cabin, boardroom-grade video calls mid-crossing, cloud gaming for younger guests.
The vessel carried a 10 Mbps dedicated Ku-band VSAT plus one unmanaged Starlink
the crew toggled to by hand — and a charter review that mentioned “patchy Wi-Fi”
had already cost a repeat booking.
The old-way cost
- 10 Mbps dedicated VSAT: $18,000/month = $216,000/year ($1,800/Mbps/mo)
- Overage during charter weeks: $2,000–$6,000/month at ~$85/GB
- Single unmanaged Starlink: fast when it worked, invisible dips during handoffs
and obstructions — every dip was every guest’s dip - One lost repeat charter attributed in part to connectivity: ~$750,000
- Status-quo run rate: ~$250,000/year, plus charter-revenue risk
The solution
West Networks Maritime 20G Kit,
installed in a 4-day yard window:
- 12× Starlink flat high-performance terminals across hardtop, mast platforms,
and aft rails (placement study from GA drawings; obstruction-mapped) - 1× OneWeb terminal — second constellation, second vendor
- 4× 5G modems with marine antennas for coastal/harbor bulk data
- Core: Peplink EPX
chassis running SpeedFusion
— up to 17 bonded paths - Per-VLAN steering: owner/guest traffic on smoothed, duplicated priority paths;
crew and ship ops tiered behind; CCTV/backup as bulk class - Legacy VSAT demoted to a bonded backstop path for the remaining contract term
- West Networks remote management — one dashboard, NOC-watched
Investment: ~$85,000 one-time + ~$12,000/month pooled service.
Results
- Measured at anchor and on passage: 2.3 Gbps down / 340 Mbps up (vs 10 Mbps)
- Cost per Mbps: $1,800 → ~$5.20 per Mbps per month (≈350× improvement)
- Guest-visible interruptions across a full charter season: zero — SpeedFusion
logged 1,900+ per-terminal dips (handoffs, obstructions, squalls), all absorbed
by hot failover and smoothing - Latency 38–55 ms typical: video calls and cloud apps “shoreside-normal”
- Overage line item: eliminated (bulk traffic auto-shifts to 5G near shore —
harbor months moved ~70% of tonnage to 5G at pennies/GB) - At VSAT renewal the dome contract was dropped: $216,000/year off the books
against ~$144,000/year of new service — net ~$100k/year saved at 230× the
bandwidth, with kit hardware paid back inside month 11 - Charter marketing now lists “2 Gbps bonded connectivity at sea” as a line item
Pull-quote for site: “Guests stopped asking for the Wi-Fi password apology
speech. That alone was worth the yard week.” — Captain (composite)